Good evening. If you would open your Bibles to the book of Psalms. Psalm 76. This psalm I had an interest in studying because of one particular phrase. You'll see it down in, where is it? Verse 10, surely the wrath of man shall praise you. The remnant of wrath you will put on like a belt. Of course, some of you have sung this, and you know that it's supposed to say, with what's left of wrath, you're girded. And I didn't know what that meant. I sang it a number of times, and I was sure it was true, but it seemed to me like it ought to mean something. I didn't know what it meant. So with that in mind, let's take a look at Psalm 76. Psalm 76 says, in Judah, God is known. His name is great in Israel. His abode has been established in Salem, his dwelling place in Zion. There he broke the flashing arrows, the shield, the sword, the weapons of war. Glorious are you, more majestic than the mountains of prey. The stout-hearted were stripped of their spoil. They sank into sleep. All of the men of war were unable to use their hands. At your rebuke, O God of Jacob, both rider and horse lay stunned. But you, you are to be feared. Who can stand before you when once your anger is roused? From the heavens you uttered judgment. The earth feared and was still when God arose to establish judgment to save all the humble of the earth. Surely the wrath of man shall praise you. The remnant of wrath you will put on like a belt. Make your vows to the Lord your God and perform them. Let all around him bring gifts to him who is to be feared, who cuts off the spirit of princes, who is to be feared by the kings of the earth. Let's have a word of prayer. Lord God and Heavenly Father, we ask now that you would open our hearts to receive your word. We pray that you would, by the power of your spirit, use this and wield this sharp word in our hearts. Lord, that you would instruct us in what you require, that you would show us how we fall short, that you would encourage us to know that you have accomplished all, that we would trust you fully, and Lord, that you would give us both the desire and the ability to turn, to trust, and to walk in a way that honors you. Lord, equip us for the week ahead, even with the words spoken this evening. We pray in Christ's name, amen. Well, Psalm 76 is just, it's got some imprecatory overtones. Psalm 76 presents a vision of the Lord that is, I think, somewhat breathtaking. It stands out like the pinnacle of a war movie. The point at which you know you've won. the point at which someone is announcing that the battle has turned in our favor. Psalm 76 is a psalm that I think, like many, is helpful for the Christian life. I don't know how I got along in the Christian life before I was as familiar with the Psalms. And I imagine someday in the future, I'll say the same thing about now. The Psalms present a full picture of the Christian life that is somewhat unedited, that doesn't pull punches, that allows for the full range of emotions and fears and sins and failures and victories that you deal with. I remember one of the first times I felt the need for what I didn't have. I was sitting in church in college, not this church, the church I'd grown up through high school in, and the middle of the sermon, someone walked up onto the platform and whispered in the pastor's ear, and he stopped preaching. And he announced that some of the missionaries, either sponsored by the Church or sent by the Church or from the Church, I don't remember at this time, but missionaries known to the Church, that they had been attacked the night before, a group of guerrillas had come in, that the women had been attacked brutally, that the men had been tied up, that some were still missing. They went on to... to say, we're going to stop now and just pray. And so at that point in the service, we just began praying. And I happened to be sitting with some people I'd gone to school with. And the woman sitting next to me had just been attacked in a similar manner two weeks earlier. So she's just weeping her eyes out at this moment. And the pastor begins praying. And he prays for the family. And he prays for those who were attacked. And he prays for the guerrillas that they would repent and come to know the Lord. And I was just too angry. I wasn't praying. I was trying but failing to pray because I was very angry. And that was my sin at that time. But I couldn't quite bring myself to pray, Lord, pray for these men who have done this that they would come to know you. And I should have been able to pray that. But I felt at that moment that while I should have been able to pray that, that shouldn't have been the whole of the prayer. Like there was something missing in the prayer. And I find that it was, it was, it was half a prayer. It was half of a good prayer. Because the other half of the prayer, Lord, that you would turn them back and that they would know you or let them be destroyed. bring justice, bring them down, keep them from hurting your people. Like that's the other half, right? But it's not something that we as Christians feel like we ought to be able to say, but it's something the Lord gives us words for. And so we get some of that in Psalm 76 and we get some of, we get something of King Jesus and his love for you and his love for justice. It begins, it says, in Judah God is known. His name is great in Israel. His abode has been established in Salem. His dwelling place is in Zion. It says here that God is known in Judah. God is known in Israel. God is known in Salem. His name is great in Salem. And so under three different terms, the city of God, the place where the Lord was pleased to to build the seat of the power of his nation, the place upon which he set the king who would be the picture of his great king to come, King Jesus, the place where he put the temple. where he promised you will come and you will make your sacrifices before me as a picture of the great sacrifice of the Messiah that is to come. The place where you will come and you will pray and I promise I will be there and I will hear your prayers as if you're coming before my face. That is the place you can come and you can know that I am there with you. In Judah, God is known. His name is great in Israel. His abode has been established in Salem. It says that God is known. Now, in one sense, God is known everywhere. We're told in the book of Romans, chapter one, that what may be known about God, His invisible attributes and His power are known by the things He has made, the things He has done through creation. There's a sense in which, you know, God doesn't believe in people that say they don't believe in God. They don't exist. And God says they don't exist. No one can efface the reality of having been made from their minds. They can live in denial. But that isn't the sort of known that God is talking about here. On the last great day when Jesus said, some people will say, didn't we not perform miracles and cast out demons in your name? Jesus will say, I never knew you. And when he says I never knew you, it doesn't mean before now I've never seen you, or I didn't know I created you, or I didn't know you existed until just now. What he means is, we don't have a relationship. You can call me your honor, but you can't call me daddy. You don't get my last name. But it says that in Jerusalem, in Salem, In the midst of God's people, in his church, God is known. God is known. In his book, The Meaning of Marriage, sorry, James. James didn't like the book, but don't worry about him. Tim Keller says, to be loved and not known is meaningless. That's sort of exhilaration of the first date. I love him, I love him, I love him. I don't even know him. That's meaningless, it's empty, it's useless, exciting as it may be. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear, right? Someday you're going to know me and what if you don't? You don't love me then. But to be known and to be loved is what we have in the gospel. It's what we need most. It's what we're aiming at in marriage. to know that person and to love them, not for who we want them to be or who we hoped they would be, but for who they are. And it's what we have in the gospel. God is known in Judah. His name is great in Israel. His abode has been established in Zion. The language here of abode, multiple places indicated that something like den or lair, the place of his dwelling, that sort of evokes pictures of what lives in dens, like lions, men who drink beer and watch football. No. What lives in lairs? We have dragons and nothing else lives in a lair besides. But here is something that is mine, and I'm here, and I'm guarding it, right? I remember watching the Discovery Channel years ago, and it was men walking through six inches of snow in a white alpine northern Siberian forest. It's all birch trees and pine trees. And as they're crunching through the snow, whispering to the camera, they're going to find the Siberian tiger, Tigress and her cubs. She's just given birth and they want to tag the cubs and do some study. So they're kind of talking to the camera quietly because, of course, mom's around here somewhere, but we don't want to bring her this direction, right? But the closer they get to the den, they're speaking even more quietly. Now they're not talking to the camera because they're getting closer to the lair, the place that is, you might not just possibly run into her, but the place she will be. not just the place where there's some potential to have a bad experience, but the place that she will guard with her life, because that is hers, and what is in there belongs to her, right? And they get there, and they begin tagging the cubs, right? And now we're working quite expeditiously, because we don't want to be here when mom gets back, right? This is her. This is her lair. And this, this is the dwelling of God. He has made his abode there. This is what he calls mine. I mean, there is no particle in the heavens that the Lord can't say this is mine, but this right here, you who proclaim the name of Christ, you are his dwelling place. He is jealous for this space, not this space, but you, his people, his cubs. There's the language there. It says, the Lord says, heaven is my footstool. Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool and I'm not served by human hands, but you are my people and this is my place. Well, what does the Lord do whenever people come into that place, whenever people want to disturb his children, those he puts his name upon and calls mine, and loves and guards jealously? Well, look at the next verse. It says, there, there in that place, there he broke the flashing arrows, the shield, the sword, and the weapons of war. Because of this next verse, glorious are you, more majestic than the mountains of prey, and the stout-hearted were stripped of their spoil, and they sank into sleep, and all the men of war were unable to use their hands at your rebuke, O God of Jacob. These are the verses that make scholars argue about whether this happened, this was on the occasion of Sennacherib's invasion, when the Assyrian army came, having conquered all of the rest of the known world around them, and then surrounded Jerusalem. It says, you know, throw out your king and we'll go away. Your God has told us we're going to take you and then in the morning, right, what happens? Well, just like it's described here, all the men of war lose the use of their hands and fall into a deep sleep and the blind men stumble through the camp and find all the food they could ever want. However, this is called a Psalm of Asaph, and that seems to place it a little further back into maybe closer to the time of David. But what it's picturing is what we see, you know, maybe it isn't the occasion of the Sennacherib's invasion, but Sennacherib's invasion is a very clear example of what this is talking about, a literal example of what this means in every possible sense. And that is that this is where the Lord protects his people. He breaks the flashing arrows, the shield, the sword, the weapons of war. Everything that is dangerous, every weapon that might be raised against you, that draws your children away, that makes you doubt in your old age, that seems to shake and break the foundations of the church. Everything that seems so dangerous now, the Lord breaks and destroys it. He brings it to nothing. The church continues to stand after all these thousands of years, not because it lives in a state of cognitive dissonance and denial, but because the Lord continues to tear down, to break down what seem in any age like the strongest of arguments and forces. Even those defenses which seem so impenetrable, the Lord tears down. One of the things we've done a couple years ago, I challenged my son, he wanted some sort of technological handheld thing, and I said, well, you can read this book, and if you read this book, then I will get you that. And so the book was by Verne Ploythoros, and yeah, Rut's raising his eyebrows there. He had to take, took him like a year and two attempts, but he finally got through it. And the point was, I want you conversant with the arguments that are attacking your faith before you get out of my house. I want you to know and be familiar with the weapons of the enemy. I want you to hear the arguments. I don't want you to hear it for the first time in a college classroom by someone who's the smartest person you think you've ever met and be completely carried away. And I want you to wrestle with that and then have the faith to entrust yourself to the arguments that the Lord puts forth. I want you to see that the Lord does in fact break down the fire, break the fiery arrows and the swords and the shields. You know, we live in this time period that so much seems dangerous and so much seems at risk. You know, remember, I don't remember who it is in the silver chair, whoever the main character's names are. But they go underground, and they end up in the queen's chamber, right? And the queen, I think she turns into a snake, and there's a fire burning, and there's smoke in the room, and maybe it's before she turns into a snake. But at any rate, she begins asking questions. Well, you talk of this world up there. And they say, yes, we're from up, up above. And she says, hold on, up above? And they say, yeah, there's no ceiling. And she goes, there's no ceiling, and yet you don't float into space. And they're like, no, we don't. How ridiculous. And what else? Well, there's this great golden ball in the sky. It just hangs in the sky and doesn't fall down. Well, yeah. And she begins talking about the world that you and I are familiar with in such a way that pretty soon the children seem ashamed to even think that they thought they lived somewhere up there. The fog and the darkness make the arguments that there is a world above the earth seem ridiculous. And then Puddle Glum stomps out the smoke and kills the queen and all of a sudden they can't remember why they thought it was so ridiculous that they lived on the surface of the earth. But we live here in the midst of this place where everything seems so dangerous and yet one day we will rise up into the pristine air before the face of the Lord God, and we will see all of these destructive weapons of war as what they are, feeble before the great King. Poor attempts. We will wonder why ever we thought hard or doubted or questioned. We will think it very strange that we were ever ashamed of the name of Christ or ever doubted His strength. There he broke the flashing arrows, the shield, the sword, the weapons of war. Glorious are you, more majestic than the mountains of prey. The stout-hearted were stripped of their spoil. They sank into sleep. All the men of war were unable to use their hands. At your rebuke, O God of Jacob, both rider and horse lay stunned. says that you are glorious, you are majestic, more than the mountains of prey. One of my favorite views at Geneva years ago was sitting out in the back of Sky Lounge, right? And you could see across, right over East Vale into that beautiful Pennsylvania hillside. And I think anyone from Pennsylvania reads this verse, more glorious are you than the mountains full of prey, right? And we're like, what a What an apt comparison, right? The beauty of Pennsylvania, the mountains, the deer, the bear, the... And that may be a wonderful comparison, but I don't think that's what it's talking about. Rather, the language seems to be that you are more glorious than all the mountains that surround us when they are completely full of the armies that make a prey of us, right? So here is the picture of little Jerusalem, mighty city, which, you know, wasn't set on the highest of hills and surrounded by mountains. And here are the armies of the nations filling the hills and the lights of the camps surrounding them. And here we say, Lord, you are more glorious than the mountains surrounded and filled up with those who make a prey of us. Think about how intimidating that would feel. And the statement is, but you're more glorious by far. And so it goes on to say, the stout-hearted were stripped of their spoil, they sank into sleep. Now, I believe C.J. Williams put his doctoral thesis on the various names given in the scriptures, and you have a group of David's mighty men who are called the sons of sleep. I think it's like, Bat Nefesh or something, I don't remember what it is. But it means sons of sleep, which sounds like a strange name. But I think they made people take long naps that they never woke up from, right? This was what they did. They put people to sleep, dirt naps. You know, this is something like an honorific title. And here it says, you made the mighty sank into a deep sleep from which they will never rise. at your rebuke, or it says, all the men of war were unable to use their hands. Think about, go back to the National Geographic, and they've arrived at the den, and the people holding the big, clear plexiglass sound dishes are outside. you know, waiting to hear if mom's returning. And the people inside are tagging the ears and the cubs begin yowling, right? And then somebody outside says, I hear her, she's on her way, right? Like, quick, give me that stinking clip. No, you dropped it. Can you imagine how much your hands would be shaking? You know, this is, men are trained for war to not do that, right? They are trained to know the process of loading the gun and aiming and firing so that it becomes automatic, so that your hands don't shake, so that you can go through the motions of war even when the adrenaline is pumping. And here is the language of those who have been fit for battle, those who are the hardened men who have seen the battlefield, who have seen the atrocities They don't shake, but here they are described as those who have lost the use of their hands. This is your king. None can stand at your rebuke. Both rider and horse lay stunned. Speaking back to the Exodus. But it says, you are to be feared. Who can stand before you when once your anger is aroused? From heaven you uttered judgment. The earth feared and was still when God arose to establish judgment to save the humble of the earth. And listen to the language. This is not simply the Lord being violent. This is the Lord loving and protecting his own. This is the Lord loving justice and bringing down that which is broken and wicked. This is the reason we rejoice that there is one who can open the scroll and who can carry out all the judgments and who can straighten what's bent and who can make all things new. But verse nine says, when God arose to establish judgment, why? To save the humble of the earth. This is your bridegroom coming to save those he loves. This is your king coming to save his people. He came once with regard to sin, and he comes again in judgment. But all power and all authority has been given to him now, and he is now, even now, ruling and reigning, and this, Zion, This is his lair, his abode, his den. You are his people. And he is a mighty king. Verse 10 says, surely the wrath of men shall praise you. And with what's left of wrath, you will be girded up. I think we should pause right there. With what's left of wrath, you are girded. Surely the wrath of man shall praise you. There are probably a handful of ways this could be interpreted, and all would be, I think, helpful to think through, and I think sometimes it's not wrong to think through the various ways in which it could be meant, because very often we use language, especially in poetic places, because of all the things it could mean, right? sort of double and triple entendre sort of thing. But what does it mean? Surely the wrath of man shall praise you, and the remnant of wrath you will put on like a belt. That the strongest and the best, the most effective, the most destructive, the best that Satan has put together, Even that will, on the last great day, be what brings glory to Christ as He's seen as more powerful yet. You know, what does Paul say, and what does the Psalm say to Pharaoh? For this very reason I have raised you up, that I might show my glory, that I might show myself to be powerful. The Lord allowed Pharaoh, allowed the course of history to run so that there would be one, in one person, a pinnacle of political and military power. so that the Lord could show his people and us down through the ages that he is more powerful yet. That which seems to remain, that which seems to stand, even that which seems to go unchecked until the end of days, where maybe we'll be standing before the throne and saying, but what about that? And the Lord says, oh, that. Well, here's what we do with that. But perhaps it's the picture of the smoke of battle and the fray and the chaos, and then one comes walking out with his robes looking like they've been dipped in blood, having tread the presses of the wrath of God. with the remnant of battle still sprayed upon him. Here is your king. It's not the one who comes to bring glad tidings to Zion. It's not the one with the beautiful feet who says, your God reigns. It is your God, it is your king walking out and saying, it's finished. They can't hurt you anymore. I've done it all with the evidence and the remnant of the best that the wrath of man had still upon his garment. And far from being cruel and vindictive Christians who don't have better sensibilities than to be glad at that sort of thing, you know what you do. when you read the paper and wickedness is brought down, when you hear of a child trafficking ring broken up at the border, do you mourn? No. You say, thank you, Jesus. You congratulate the police officer, the men who put their lives at risk to bring those children out of harm's way. You rejoice when wickedness is destroyed. And this is the picture that's given to you of your great king striding out of battle, the victor, with the best that man had to offer, and the wrath of men in all of its seeming glory breaking upon him and coming to nothing, and him saying, I wear now as a trophy the best that men had to offer. You know, what does the guy from the bayou, what does he have on the brim of his hat, right? Or around his neck? What does he wear, like, shrimp? No, there's no shrimp around his neck. What does he put around his neck? He's got the alligator teeth, right? He's got the business end of an alligator hanging around his neck. Because this is what happens when they come to take my right hand, right? We're going to... Yes, I didn't buy this at a souvenir shop. Here is the picture. This is your king, now wearing as a trophy what seems to threaten you, what seems so dangerous. So how are you gonna live? Well, the end of the 12th chapter of Romans, Paul gives a series of what you should live. How shall we now live? He says, you know, hospitality, do not pay back evil for evil, pay back evil for good. And he goes down this long list of what you should give yourself to, right? He even says, leave room for the wrath of God. And maybe we ask the question, who's gonna take care? You know, how is it that as Christians we can really content ourselves with things like hospitality? and being kind and generous and constantly in prayer, well, we can content ourselves with that, because our Lord has contented himself with this. The Lord has the justice. He is gonna take care of that which tries to harm his people, and you and I can content ourselves with what he has called us to, living lives of piety, of quietness, of hospitality, because our king is at the door. He's at the door of his house. How are we gonna live? It says, make your vows to the Lord your God and perform them and let all around him bring gifts to him who is to be feared, who cuts off the spirit of princes, who is to be feared by the kings of the earth. This one alone is worth living for. Nothing else, no one else, no other idea, no other ideology is worth living for. The one who made you, the one who died for you, the one who defends you, the one who loves you, the one who jealously fights for you. Let's pray. Lord God and Heavenly Father, we thank you for this picture of you, mighty in battle, mighty to save. This picture of you. wearing as a trophy the strongest and best of those who would oppose and seek to destroy on your holy mountain, those who would come after us, your people, your church around the world. Lord, we ask that we might have firmly in our minds how glorious you are, more glorious than all that would surround and seek to destroy, more glorious than the mightiest and the most powerful and the most intricate and the most contrived ideologies that man can develop. Lord, we ask that you would make us most content and glad to entrust ourselves to you and that we would see you as most worthy of our worship, of our lives. Lord, that this week you would give us this vision of you that would give us the strength and the courage to live for you. that would give us the joy of heart to love you as we seek to obey your commandments and do what pleases you. And Lord, we thank you that you came once, not simply on the horse of war, but you came humble and lowly riding on a donkey to lay down your life to pay for the sins of your people. Lord, that we would now content ourselves with the work that you give us to do knowing that we can leave room for the wrath of God. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.